Tag Archives: mabu chinese horse

A Simple Exercise for Sinking the Weight in the Martial Arts

Happy after Easter! Hope you don’t run over any eggs when you mow your lawn. Yuck!

Okay, here is one of the exercises I use, especially for kids, but great for anybody who wishes to find the true foundation of karate or any other martial art.

Grounding. It is when you sink your weight into the ground. Simply, you have to sink your weight, to attach the machine that is your body so that you can use that machine. This is basic mechanics.

I am always, when I teach forms, telling people to sink their weight. They have to bend both legs, feel the weight, let the weight reach the ground, so that the tan tien will create energy.

You don’t reach the ground, you have no energy. You have no real energy building inside your legs.

It’s funny, people doing boxing, kick boxing, modern tournament type freestyle, they bounce. They want to look like Bruce Lee. But before Bruce, everybody sank their weight, shifted their weight between their feet as they edged towards the opponent. It was the gunfighter mentality. Sink, edge forward, spring.

Nowadays, unfortunately, everybody has forgotten this. Everybody wants to bounce. Bouncing uses up muscles. Sinking the weight creates…endless energy. Energy that can be used to spring like a cat.

Okay, the best stance for teaching this is the horse stance. The horse stance can be used in freestyle, quite easily, but the true glory of the horse stance is simply for the creation of energy.

So you have the kids face in a direction. You say back, they pop their horse stance to the rear. You say right, they pop it to the right side, left is the other side, front is back to the front.

When I say ‘POP,’ that is key. Here’s the secret, you must NOT let the body raise in the air. The head must not bob up and down.

You must ‘swap’ your feet so fast that you don’t have time to fall, and you must do so without popping up. This is not an exercise in falling, it is an exercise in moving so fast you don’t have time to fall.

The secret here is that you have to use the tan tien. To properly pop your stance, to move both feet so they start at the same time, and land at the same time, you must explode from the tan tien to make this happen.

simple exercise, eh? And, when teaching a class, it’s sort of fun. Kids love it. They’ll bob up and down all over the place, but you just go around and hold a hand over their head, and tell them not to touch it.

Works every time. Here’s a link to the actual forms and exercises that I use to build Chi.